Barry Seidman’s interview with Takis Fotopoulos for the US
radio program
Equal Time for Freethought*

On the multi-dimensional crisis

Barry:
Welcome Takis Fotopoulos to Equal Time for Freethought. You
begin your book and indeed your analysis of the effects of
the growth economy on society by calling attention to the
multidimensional crisis. Can you give us a brief overview of
what this crisis looks like in our everyday lives and how we
got to be in such a predicament in the first place?

Takis:
I think few people today dispute the fact that society is
going through a multidimensional crisis, which extends to
the political, the economic, the social, the cultural and of
course the ecological level and, which, in fact, is also a
universal crisis not only in the geographical sense
because the institutions of modernity
―I
mean the system of market economy and representative
democracy―
are now universal, but also in the sense of its scope. That
is, not only the structures of the present system are now
questioned by many people, but also the values themselves,
particularly the value of Progress, with respect to the
ecological crisis. I think we can trace the causes of this
crisis to the concentration of power at all levels, which
has been created by the system of market economy and
representative democracy.

So, we first have a crisis in politics, a crisis that has
started since the end of the 18th century when
the Founding Fathers of the US constitution literally
invented representative democracy, because up to then the
prevailing meaning of democracy was the classical meaning, I
mean the direct exercise of power by people themselves. And
then, if we go briefly through the various phases of
modernity, we can see how the dynamics instituted by
representative democracy led to more and more concentration
of power. We have, first, concentration of power in the
hands of parliamentarians, then, during the statist phase of
democracy, we have concentration of power in governments and
the leadership of mass parties, and then, today, we have the
development of what we may call statecraft, in other
words, we have parties changing or replacing each
other after elections, every four or five years, parties
which are indistinguishable as regards their political
programs and which are no longer mass parties. At the same
time, we have huge and rising abstention rates all over the
developed capitalist world, respect for politicians is
almost nil, apathy with respect to what passes as politics
is growing
―although
this does not mean apathy in general with respect to
politics, as this is shown by Seattle, then Genoa, then
today in Argentina, Venezuela and so on.

As regards the economic crisis, again, as a result of the
globalization process, we have a growing inequality not only
between North and South but within North and South as well…

Barry:
When you refer to North and South you mean hemispheres?

Takis:
Yeah, what I think we have at the moment is the creation of
a bipolar world, in other words, one world, which includes
the privileged by globalization social groups, which can be
found both in the North and the South, and at the same time
we have the creation of another world, which is left out of
the supposedly universal benefits of globalization. (So,
there is) a growing gap which is shown by all kinds of
statistics; to give you just one example one per cent (1%)
of the world’s population earning eighty per cent (80%) of
world income, ten per cent (10%) owning eighty five percent
(85%) of world wealth and so on. And, in fact, this
growing gap is not just a consequence of the present system,
but also a precondition for its reproduction because,
actually, there are no natural resources for the system to
reproduce the standard of living or the standard of
consumption, achieved at the moment in the United States or
Western Europe all over the world .

Then, we have a social crisis, because the growth economy
―which
is an offspring of the market economy— had created a growth
society, with consumerism, privacy, alienation,
disintegration of social ties and so on having created a
non-society, where families take the place of society. A
symptom of this (social crisis) is the explosion of crime.
In the United States of America it took two hundred years to
raise its prison population to a million, but in the
last ten years it was doubled, and this creates insecurity
not only in lower social groups, but also in upper social
groups where we have luxury ghettoes which complement
the misery ghettoes and so on.

Then, we have a cultural crisis which is a direct product of
globalization. We have a cultural homogenization
―which
has created a backlash in terms of cultural nationalism— and
this is again a result of the liberalization and
deregulation and commercialization of culture, all of these
being byproducts of globalization.

And then, of course, we have the ecological crisis, which
has become now front page news, with the greenhouse effect
and the climate change threatening life itself within the
next fifty, or at most one hundred years: disappearance of
species, deforestation, pollution and so on. Again, this can
be shown that it is directly related to the system of the
market economy and its offspring the growth economy. It can
be shown, in other words, how, for example as regards the
greenhouse effect, the concentrations of greenhouse gases
have increased almost geometrically since the industrial
revolution. The cumulative effect is much higher now than in
the entire history of human beings.

So, we can see that we have a multidimensional crisis which,
in fact, can be traced to the concentration of power that
has been created by the institutions of modernity.

On “actually existing socialism”

Barry:
That’s a good overview of the multidimensional crisis.
Before we talk about the sort of political or economic
system Americans may be most familiar with, the ongoing
debate between neoliberal and welfare state markets, you
made clear in your work your thoughts on, what is called
‘actually existing socialism in the former USSR, China,
today’s Cuba. Could not socialism,
if
re-worked to bemore democratic than in these countries, for instance,
get us out of this crisis?

Takis:
No, I don’t think so, because the problem with actually
existing socialism is that, from the beginning, it was based
on a theory or an ideology of the vanguard of the party,
which was supposed to play a hegemonic role, or a leading
role in determining events. The soviets have been, in fact,
replaced by the monopoly of power of the Party very early
on. There are of course objective conditions that could
explain this —the encirclement by the West and the (Second
World) war, the cold war going later on and so on―
but I think these are not enough to explain the distortions
of the democratic process, which was supposed to be
created by the soviet system. I think that it was the
ideology itself that created a kind of
―if
not authoritarian―
a kind of non-democratic structure, in the sense that power
was, again, concentrated in the hands of elites. In the same
way that, in the Western system, we have power concentrated
in the hands of capitalist elites and the elites of
parliamentarians, in the soviet system, we have
concentration of power in the hands of the soviet elites,
the bureaucrats and the technocrats. So, I don’t think that
this system either could secure political democracy.
Perhaps, it was better than the Western system in terms of
securing the satisfaction of basic needs of all citizens
and, in fact, there are Western studies confirming that
―at
the same level of development―
the Soviet Union has achieved a higher satisfaction of basic
needs than the Western system, but, at the political level,
I don’t think that there were any significant steps toward a
kind of democracy, like the one we are discussing.

On social democracy

Barry:
Ok. Many liberals and even progressives in the United States
here might argue that for a while, from just before WWII
through the early 1970s, here and in parts of Europe like
Scandinavia or Western Europe, a good balance was struck
between the capitalist economy and human welfare, with
Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and
with, like I said, the efforts of, say, Scandinavia. What do
you attribute to the rolling back of the social welfare
state in America and Europe and why are you arguing we not
return to those pre-Ronald Reagan and pre-Margaret Thatcher
conditions?

Takis:
The reason is that
―and
on this I disagree profoundly with the reformist Left
analysis that this is just a matter of the failure of the
Left, or the failure of social democratic parties, or of the
treason of social democratic leaderships and so on, I don’t
think that these are adequate explanations―
I think that we can explain why social democracy has in
effect died since the rise of neoliberal globalization, if
we see the economic processes that were going on. Although I
do not want to adopt a kind of economistic type of approach,
because, in my analysis, the social outcome every time
depends on the interaction between objective conditions,
(that is, in this case, economic events) and subjective
conditions, (that is the outcome of the social struggle),
what happened was that, as soon as the economy started being
internationalized
―or
globalized according to others―
that meant that markets had to be liberated, had to be
opened, and that meant in turn that statism, in the form we
have known it in the 50s and in the 60s, became impossible.
It became impossible, because opened and liberated,
unregulated markets meant that capital was free to move from
country to country to find out where the most profitable
conditions of production were available. Obviously, if you
have a country like Sweden or Britain, where tax rates in
the 50s and the 60s as regards corporation taxes, or other
direct taxes like personal income tax, were high for
high-income groups, then this meant an increase in the cost
of production for multinationals, which would prefer a
country like India or China that offers conditions of
investment without a high cost in terms of tax rates, or
even in terms of social insurance contributions for
employees and so on. So, as soon as the economy became
internationalized, statism, in the form that we knew it, was
dead. Governments that tried actually to oppose this trend
―and
there were attempts, like (those of) president Mitterand in
France or (of Oscar) Lafontaine, who was finance secretary
to the Chancellor Schroeder in Germany and so on, to reverse
this neoliberal trend―
had to reverse their policies when they found out that
immediately (after) they began implementing any effective
restrictions on capital (in terms of high tax rates etc.),
they were either threatened by the movement of capital
abroad, or a crisis in their currency, or a crisis in their
stock exchanges and so on, and they had to change policies.
So, that’s why, today, it’s impossible to have the kind of
social democracy we had in the 50s and the 60s.

On the meaning of democracy

Barry:
Speaking of democracy, this leads me to ask you how you
define democracy. As you know
―and
as many Americans don’t understand―
our Founding Fathers were hesitant to call what they were
creating with the colonies, a “democracy”, calling the
United States, instead, a “republic”. First, what is
democracy, if not what we have in America, or where you are
today in England?

Takis:
As I said before, the classical meaning of democracy was the
direct exercise of political power by the people. This was a
tradition that started with the classical Athenian example
and continued later on in the Middle Ages with some cities
in Europe, and then we see the same trend coming back every
time we had any kind of revolutionary or insurrectionary
process. That means that it is the people themselves
who, through face- to- face assemblies, take all important
political decisions. This was the initial conception of
democracy, which presupposed of course a certain degree of
decentralization. That’s why it was possible in classical
Athens, where something like 30,000 people were taking part
in assemblies once or twice a month, but it was also
possible in the French revolution, in the 1790s (Parisian)
sections where neighborhoods were concentrating in
neighborhood assemblies, they were assembling there, and
having their meetings. You could imagine a system where
these assemblies are federating in regional assemblies and
then in confederal assemblies and so on. So, it has been
done in the past, and this was actually the original idea
because there is no democracy if your will is not expressed
directly. That is, you can perhaps delegate your will, you
can appoint a delegate to express your wish on particular
issues, but nobody can express your own will. When you elect
a representative, you simply give power to somebody else to
take decisions for you, within a period of four years,
without asking you on any important issues that he or she
takes decisions
―that’s
what a representative democracy means. In fact, there is a
very good study by (Ellen) Wood, an American writer, who
shows how the representative democracy that was introduced
by the Founding Fathers was not introduced because they
thought that the population sizes were so big so that it was
impossible to have direct democracy, but, on the contrary,
it was introduced
―and
explicitly was stated so―
because they thought that it could not be left to the masses
to decide everything and that what was needed, in other
words, was to create such a system so that it is the elites
―although
they may have not used this term―
which take decisions actually on important issues. So, the
idea of direct democracy is one that is coming back, again
and again, up to May ’68 of course, and up to today : in
every kind of insurrection we have in Latin America,
Venezuela, Argentina and so on, you would see people meeting
in general assemblies and taking decisions directly.

Barry:
Is there a possible role for something called the state?
Maybe a less hierarchical government in a direct democracy,
or is that completely impossible—an oxymoron?

Takis:
In what sense?

Barry:
For instance, you’re not correlating the kind of
confederations and assemblies to a hierarchical kind of
government, what we used to have in an official state where
we have a top down hierarchy, so I’m assuming (that) in a
direct democracy, where you eliminate a top down hierarchy,
you don’t really have anything that anyone would recognize
as a state anymore…

Takis:
This is the whole idea, i.e. today we have what we may call
a statist democracy in the sense that it presupposes what
many people in the literature call separation of polity from
society. Today, in other words, society is not polity
itself, whereas in a direct democracy, society and polity
are integrated — they are one. So, in this sense, direct
democracy is a stateless democracy, that is, it’s not a
“rule”, as some libertarians call direct democracy. It’s not
a rule, because a rule presupposes that there is a minority,
which separates itself from society and takes decisions.
But, when everybody takes part in the decision-taking
process, sets the laws and agrees, or not, with the laws
suggested by other people taking part in the assembly, then,
in fact there is no rule any more. In fact, there is no
separation of society from polity. So I can’t see how you
can have any kind of democracy co-existing with the
state, because in this case we don’t have any more an
integrated society with polity, we have two different
systems.

On the meaning of Inclusive Democracy

Barry:
Ok. All this adds up to what you have called inclusive
democracy. Sound bites are not what our show is all about,
but if someone asks you to define inclusive democracy in
seventy-five words or less, what would you say?

Takis:
I would say inclusive democracy is the authority of
demos, and by demos I mean the civil body in a
particular area, it may be a town or maybe several
communities and so on. So, it is the authority of demos over
the political decision-taking process, the economic
decision-taking process and generally over any kind of
decisions that can be taken collectively. This is why I
defined the constituents, the main elements of inclusive
democracy, as the following ones :

political or direct democracy, which refers to the
institutions institutionalizing direct political
decision-taking by the assemblies;

economic democracy, which means that it is again
(demotic) assemblies that take all important (economic)
decisions;

democracy in the social realm, which means in effect
self-management in education, in work and so on, where
workplace assemblies define the way in which work should
be done in workshops, factories and offices; and,
finally,

ecological democracy, which means the reintegration of
society with Nature.

In other words, to sum it up, inclusive democracy is the
reintegration of society with polity, the economy and
Nature.

On Economic Democracy and how it works

Barry:
So, let’s do a thought experiment. In some future society we
have eliminated free market capitalism, market socialism
such as social democracy, and the hierarchical state. What
was formerly known as the United States of America is now an
inclusive democracy. What would we see? For instance, have
we returned to several thousand little communities, as
primitivists argue for? Could we really operate without
presidents, governors, and mayors?

Takis:
What we can imagine is that, first of all, we need a radical
decentralization, that is, you cannot have a direct
democracy, or an inclusive democracy for that purpose, in a
country the size of the United States, unless you have
radical decentralization. Radical decentralization does not
mean physical decentralization, it can be an administrative
decentralization, and this can be done, and it has been done
in the past. In fact, decentralization is today necessary if
we want to take any effective measures to deal with the
ecological crisis
―apart
from the fact that decentralization would create again the
social ties which have been destroyed by the present market
society. So, once you have decentralization and you have
divided a country like the United States into units of, say,
50,000 people in each unit, each demos, then each demos
will have its own demotic assembly which would take all
basic political and economic decisions
―I’ll
explain in a moment what I mean by economic decisions— and,
given that there are of course many problems which could not
be solved at the local level, there are regional problems
―for
example, electricity and so on―
or there may be confederal problems, which refer to the
entire United States, or even to the entire world…

Barry:
I was gonna question somewhere in this program on how to
deal with the space program or the global warming or health
care.

Takis:
… we can have, therefore, confederations of demoi,
which would deal with the problems that cannot be sorted out
at the local level, and, regional and confederal assemblies
for regional and confederal problems (respectively). Then,
as regards the economic in particular arrangements, what we
suggest in the inclusive democracy project is not to leave
everything to planning mechanisms, as is usually the
case in various socialist models, but, instead, to combine a
kind of artificial market with the planning mechanism.
That’s why we make the crucial distinction between basic
needs and non-basic needs.

Barry:
Ok, before you go a little bit further into that, which I
want to hear about, you just said artificial markets, and
I’ve been discussing with a friend of mine, how market
abolitionists argue that the marketization process
―and
you argue this in your book as well―
is the key problem, the key economic reason we are in
the multidimensional crisis to begin with. What do you
exactly mean by artificial markets? How
(are they) different than (actual-existing) markets?

Takis:
What I mean is that this market will not presuppose a
monetary system
―neither
a state, of course―
threfore what it means, in effect, is that we have a market
that creates a sort of artificial prices, so that the
allocation of resources takes place. This works through a
voucher system, as we propose, but in fact, with modern
technology, it could work also with a special credit card,
that is, credit cards could play exactly the same role as
vouchers.

So, to come back to the distinction I made between basic and
non-basic needs, as regards basic needs, the principle
applying on the satisfaction of basic needs, we think, has
to be the old communist principle, “from each according to
his ability to each according to her need” because no
freedom of choice can be achieved without the
satisfaction of basic needs for all citizens.

Barry:
What do you mean about basic needs?

Takis:
Basic needs is something that would be defined by demotic
assemblies: which are the basic needs, and even what is the
entitlement of each citizen for basic needs. I would
imagine, however, that assemblies would determine that basic
needs are not just the survival needs, that is, food,
clothing, housing, and so on, but also the main needs that
today have become basic for modern society, like
communication needs, travel needs
―apart
of course from health, education and so on (the welfare
needs).

Barry:
Will the people have a say in determining what the basic
needs are?

Takis:
Yeah, but not through the demotic assembly; what we
suggest is that to get homogeneity in the covering of basic
needs in a country, say, like the USA, it’s the confederal
assembly that would determine which are the basic needs and
the entitlement of each citizen so that these basic needs
could be met. Then, however, we introduce the element of
freedom of choice, (the lack of) which is a basic drawback
of usual planning models that, in fact, do not secure
freedom of choice when they say “you have to predict a year
in advance what will be your consumption” etc. That’s why we
have this system of vouchers or credit cards, where you can
use your basic vouchers to decide which are the
satisfiers, that is, the means of satisfying the basic
needs. So, you don’t have a voucher saying that you have to
use “clothes” from the state monopoly, because this creates
all the problems that have been created in the Soviet Union,
but, instead, you can choose from any collective that
produces clothes, using your basic vouchers to buy from
them. This way, you secure freedom of choice and, at the
same time, you cover the basic needs.

As regards the non-basic needs now, there, you could apply
the principle of meeting the non-basic needs on the basis of
effort rather than on the basis of need, which we have
described before…

Barry:
In the confederations there are, as I understand, several of
these confederate level groups of people along the size of
the current United States, so that there would be more than
a very small amount, more than a concentrated amount of
people, making these kinds of decisions of what basic needs
are and what non-basic needs are and what should be the
choices?

Takis: Yeah, this is the idea, because otherwise,
through the confederal assemblies, you may create new kinds
of hierarchies, so to avoid this, what we propose is that
both regional assemblies and confederal assemblies should
consist of recallable delegates, that is, it is the demotic
assemblies, at the base level, which (effectively, though
not formally) will take the decisions about what is a basic
need, and then these decisions will be conveyed through
their delegates to regional assemblies and then, through the
regional delegates, to the confederal assemblies. So, in
effect, it is the majorities that had been created de facto
in demotic assemblies, which would determine at the
confederal level which are the basic needs and how we
satisfy them. And, in fact, the demotic assemblies have, as
I said, the power to recall any delegate who is not going to
implement the decisions of the demotic level.

Barry:
A lot of people come to me and say they’re appalled and
bewildered when I tell them that this is a society without
money, without a form of currency. Are vouchers another kind
of money or currency?

Takis:
No, that’s why we suggest a system of vouchers rather than
money itself, because money has in fact three basic
functions: it is a medium of exchange of course, but it is
also a store of wealth, and a unit of account. Now, we want
to abolish the function of money as a store of wealth and
that’s why vouchers are personal vouchers, that is they are
issued for each person, on the basis of his/her own basic
needs. Or, if they work more than the basic number of hours,
then, they are entitled to non-basic vouchers, and as I
said, this could also be done through a credit card system.
Now, we want to abolish money, exactly in order not to
(allow it) to play the role of store of wealth. This is
because, if you say that these vouchers are issued in
terms of normal money, then some people may be saving more,
or other people may not be
―for
any reason―
using all their vouchers and so on. So, this way, you have
some sort of accumulation of wealth building up and this
accumulation of wealth could easily create, in the future,
pressures for the restoration of a proper market rather than
the artificial market we are talking about. That’s why we
are talking about personal vouchers.

Barry:
On the larger scale, in producing products and goods and
things we need (food, etc.), how does in an inclusive
democracy goods get distributed?

Takis:
You mean how you could achieve some sort of equal
satisfaction between very different regions? Is that…?

Barry:
Well yeah, because obviously not every single community, or
group of people, have the resources and the ability at hand
to create all the stuff they need and not only will these
natural resources have to be distributed from one area of
the country to another, but also from one part of the world
to another. So how does this happen in your system?

Takis:
Of course, there is a high diversity in the distribution of
natural resources, especially in a country like the USA. So,
that’s why we propose that the confederal assemblies will
take care
―when
they decide the resources available in the confederation―
of these diversities. In fact, they will take explicit
action to distribute equally the benefits from the natural
resources in various areas, because, otherwise, you cannot
talk about individual and social autonomy being achieved by
all members of the confederation but, instead, you’re
talking about another jungle being created, with rich areas
becoming even wealthier and poor areas becoming perhaps even
poorer than before! So, it is within the duties of the
confederal assembly to redistribute the benefits of natural
advantages equally among all members. Actually, this is
being done, or is supposed to be done, even today, within,
for example, the European Union, that is, they’re supposed
to be trying to redistribute the benefits (arising out) of
the inequality (in the distribution) of natural resources
between various countries in Europe, through subsidies and
so on. So, I suppose, if even in a capitalist union
like the European Union, at least they’re supposed to be
doing this, then it could be done even more so in a
confederal Inclusive Democracy!

Barry:
Ok. A co-producer of mine asked me this question about
inclusive democracy. He said what about the innovation
capitalist markets seem to produce, as far as new products
or scientific advances and new technologies are concerned?
What would be our incentive to produce anything other than
what some community thinks it
needs,
so
that we don’t stall progress, and of
course
―clarifying
progress―
I mean ecologically safe progress?

Takis:
Yeah, good question. First of all, we have to understand
that the aims of the system that I described do not include
growth as such, in other words, we are supposed to move away
from a growth economy, because this is anyway the only way
we can create a sustainable society today, I mean an
ecologically sustainable society. So, that’s why we argue
that the basic aim is to meet the basic needs of all people,
as well as the non-basic needs of people who are willing to
offer more effort, so that they can satisfy better their
basic needs, or other needs. That means that, although
growth is out, still, there may be necessary to have some
sort of (occasional) growth, if for example, we need more
investment in order to produce something more economically,
or perhaps in a way that satisfies better human needs. This
is something that could be done, through the assembly
system, and nobody argues that in a confederal Inclusive
Democracy there will be no experts, who will be trying to
devise new methods of production and so on. That is, the
difference with present capitalist society, is that, today,
it is capitalist corporations which decide, on the basis of
their own motives
―the
profit motive and so on―
which new techniques and new technologies will be adopted or
not, whereas in a confederal inclusive democracy, experts,
again, could suggest new methods of production and I can see
no reason why assemblies will not decide for the
introduction of a new invention or a new way of producing,
as long of course, as you said, this does not create a
serious ecological problem.

Barry:
Right. What about information? How does information spread
in an inclusive democracy : radio, internet, books? I’m
assuming it’s similar, but I was just curious because it’s
sort of an intangible.

Takis:
It is supposed that mass media, and means of communication
in general, are controlled again by the (demotic) assemblies
on the one hand, and on the other, the people working in the
mass media enterprises
―if
you like to call them like this. In other words, on the one
hand, the demotic assemblies, or the regional, or confederal
assemblies we were talking about, will take the general
guideline decisions about what sort of policies, say, a
(demotic/regional/confederal respectively) TV channel will
favor
―for
example, not to produce pornographic programs or whatever―
and the mass media people, the people working in the mass
media, would decide what sort of programs they will produce
in detail, that is whether they are going to have scientific
programs, or entertainment programs, or whatever. This will
be decided at the level of the mass media, but within the
general guidelines set by the assemblies.

Barry:
The assemblies and the confederations and everything in
between we’re talking about, all this, I suppose, (involves)
people on a general level, of the demos etc., but is there a
separate set of assemblies, for instance, within what is now
corporations, which involve large groups of people producing
specific things like on the job assemblies? Are they
connected directly with general assemblies or are they
separate assemblies for people working in?

Takis:
Yeah, apart from the demotic assemblies, where people take
part as citizens and express the general interest —and of
course the same applies to regional and confederal
assemblies―
there are also workplace assemblies, which are based in each
workplace, either it is a factory, or an office, or an
educational institution and so on. These workplace
assemblies take all the decisions for the day- to- day
running of the workplace, as well as decisions about how to
divide the tasks of production, on the basis, first, of the
instructions given by the confederal assembly about the
production of basic goods and, second, on the basis of the
demand they have for their products, which is revealed by
the voucher system. So, again, as with mass media, it is the
confederal assembly that would give instructions as regards
the targets for covering the basic needs, but as regards the
non-basic needs, it is consumers themselves who decide what
each individual enterprise will produce and then it is the
workplace assembly that will take all the decisions about
the running of the factory, etc.

On Human Nature

Barry:
Ok. Just two more questions, on this level...sort of
philosophical questions. I’m gonna play devil’s advocate
here, because I don’t necessarily believe what I’m about to
read, but I have a question that some people do ask me. What
about human nature? Some people here in the United States,
some of my friends in fact, would ask how would such a
cooperative egalitarian society function with such greedy
selfish warlike creatures that human beings are running the
show?

Takis:
I think this is in fact an ideology, that is, the attempt to
explain human society on the basis of what human nature is,
or how human nature has developed today, is not irrelevant
to the institutional framework that developed in the last
two hundred years. In other words, it is the value systems
that prevailed since the emergence of the system of the
market economy two hundred years ago
―the
individualistic values, the competitive values and so on,
which are parts of the liberal ideology— it is this value
system that can explain such ideas as that “human nature is
individualistic” and so on. There is no scientific evidence
to show this, and, in fact, I don’t think that we are born
either to be individualistic, competitive and so on
―as
some liberal philosophers argue— or, alternatively, that we
are born to be co-operative, living in solidarity and
behaving in a mutual aid fashion and so on –(as some
libertarian philosophers do). I think all these (behaviours)
are determined later on, through the socialization process,
that is, from day one that we are born, we are socialized to
adopt certain values by family, school, mass media, etc. So,
all these ideas about human nature being this or that, I
think, simply reflect the institutional framework of
society.

On Religion and Fundamentalism

Barry:
America, and much of the world outside of Europe, is still
pretty religious
―from
New Age spirituality to Christian and Islamic
fundamentalism. Such powerful
cultural coping mechanisms and supernaturalistic explanations of reality skew what we
know and what we do. How will Inclusive Democracy work under
these, or through these, circumstances?

Takis:
A basic condition, or precondition, I would say for
democracy, and I mean genuine democracy like Inclusive
Democracy, is that people take decisions and make their own
laws, and society itself makes its own laws, and recognizes
itself as a source of these laws. That means that
irrationalisms of various kinds, like the ones you
mentioned, cannot be the basis for a democratic or genuine
democratic society. Of course, this does not exclude the
possibility that some individual citizens may be religious,
but no democratic society could survive if people try to
bring these values, the religious values, into the
decision-taking process, because then we’re not going to
have a democracy anymore —it would not be our own laws that
we vote for, but, instead, the laws that are written in the
Koran or the Bible, or whatever. So, all these sorts of
irrationalisms, by definition, are excluded by an Inclusive
Democracy, in the sense that no democracy could be based on
religion, or any other kind of irrationalism, although, as I
said, at the individual level, this does not exclude the
possibility that some people may still believe in God or
whatever. But, once they take part in the assemblies, they
have to accept the basic democratic principle that it
iswe here that we take our own
decisions, vote for our own laws, define our own
truth, if you like, and we do not take (for granted) any
externally given truths.

Barry:
Well, obviously, in a representative democracy like here in
the United States, where there are supposed to be
constitutional laws separating church and state, if you no
longer have organized churches necessarily being able to
influence power
because that would be authoritarian
—or
(of course) the state influencing power—
and you have just the demos...
I’m just wondering how feasible it would be not to assume
that large groups of people who consider themselves
religious, say Islamic or Christian fundamentalists
―and
there are plenty of them to go around―
wouldn’t as a group try to influence the demos, based on
this external truth, and how would an inclusive democracy
prevent that?

Takis:
(Yeah,) but here we do a big jump! That is, if you try to
establish tomorrow an inclusive democracy in the United
States, or in Iran, obviously this will be impossible.
Clearly, there is a transitional process that we have to go
through and during this transitional process you could
expect that people would create a different kind of
consciousness for a different kind of society and
―actually
this is a basic element of the transitional strategy we
suggest within this project―
we want to achieve this kind of society by trying, first, to
educate people and, second and more important, by creating
institutions within the present society which prefigure the
inclusive democracy. It is in other words the interaction of
education and practice that would lead to this new kind of
society. So, you could expect, and this is what we require
actually, that this kind of democratic consciousness
should have become hegemonic before society
changes into an inclusive democracy. This was, I would say,
the basic flaw of the socialist strategy, the Leninist
strategy and so on, that is, that they tried first to
conquer power, and then, from above, to create a new
consciousness. I think that, unless the democratic
consciousness has become hegemonic before we
reach the new kind of society, this (strategy) is going to
fail, as it failed in the Soviet Union and so on. So, we
expect that at least the majority (of the population), by
the time we have (reached) an inclusive democracy, will not
be fundamentalist, or religious like you described it,
otherwise…

Barry:
Right. We
can also make the argument, as
others on this show have, that a good reason that there is
so much a re-awakening of fundamentalist religiosity
―and
obviously in the Middle East and the United States―
is, because of the multidimensional crisis leading people
towards more radical forms of religion.

Takis:
This is true, this is how you can explain why, for example,
the Arab populations have become fundamentalist today. This
was not always so. Twenty or thirty years ago, you had Arab
nationalism, you had Arab socialism, but not fundamentalism.
So, it is part of the multidimensional crisis that you had
this shift to religious fundamentalism, and, of course, when
we are talking about moving to an inclusive democracy we are
talking, also, in terms of getting out of this
multidimensional crisis, we see inclusive democracy not just
as a utopia, but, also, as a way of getting out of
this multidimensional crisis.

On the transitional strategy

Barry:
Well, that was my last question, how do we get from here to
there? What are some steps that we could, the demos, take to
get from here to there? You mentioned education and turning
back the multidimensional crisis, but actually can you
lay out for us some cases by reference to social examples,
political or economic examples? What’s the strategy leading
from here to there?

Takis:
I think that the strategy leading to an inclusive democracy
should basically aim three important or fundamental
aims, that is, to create:

first, a rupturing of the socialization process, so that
a new social paradigm for a genuine inclusive democracy
becomes hegemonic, as I mentioned before;

second, a gradual involvement of increasing numbers of
people in a new kind of politics where, in a new kind of
organization, they would implement the principles and
the values of an inclusive democracy; and

third, a parallel shifting of economic resources from
the market economy, through the creation of the new
institutions I mentioned, which, in fact, are new
popular bases of political and economic power.

Barry: What of some examples of those political
and economic shadow societies, so to speak?

Takis:
First of all, such experiments are already at work both in
Europe and I think in the United States as well. That is,
there are various experiments to create new institutions at
the economic level. In Britain there are the LETS Schemes
which try to abolish money and create direct exchange
(barter) to help unemployed people. Then, there are of
course co-ops, workers collectives in various places,
eco-villages in Australia and so on. All these (experiments)
are in fact (a kind of) prefiguring of a future society. The
problem with all these experiments, however, is that they
are not integral parts of a new anti-systemic movement, i.e.
of a new movement to replace the present system of market
economy and representative democracy. They are just
individual examples of groups of people in various parts of
the world trying, through example, to create the
consciousness needed to move to a different society–(a
strategy) which, I think, is doomed to failure. There has to
be, in other words, a political project. There has to be an
analysis of the present situation, the envisioning of the
kind of society we want to build, and the strategy to move
from here to there. All these groups, in fact, do not
satisfy these conditions, and that’s why usually they are
marginalized or they’re even being used by the system
itself, so that they could replace the lack of welfare
services through these kinds of services from below. So,
this is one way.

Another way that we suggest, is contesting local elections,
which is not only an educational exercise, but also could
give us the chance to begin changing society from below,
here and now, rather than waiting to change society from
above, after the conquest of state power and so on.

Barry:
Yeah, but would it be consistent, what would go into
contesting a local election? What would someone be doing?

Takis:
Yeah, actually some libertarians do criticize us for taking
part in local elections, in the sense that this way we may
recognize state institutions and so on. In fact, however,
there are many references, even to classical anarchists like
Bakunin, who thinks that local elections are a completely
different kind of elections than state elections, in the
sense that there are direct ties between citizens and
councilors. So, the question is how
―when
you are contesting the elections and you gain power in a
particular local area―
you can create institutions of direct democracy, I mean
(political institutions) like neighborhood assemblies, and
economic institutions like cooperatives, demotic enterprises
and so on. How you create such institutions, which in fact
replace the present representative, institutions, and you
don’t make them just formalities; that is, the essence of
political and economic power could be moved to people
themselves, directly, once you gain power in some particular
areas. But, even if you don’t gain power, again, there is
the educational advantage that you can create contact and
appeal to many more people than by trying to achieve the
same through individual example in your neighborhood and so
on.

Barry:
One final question. The multidimensional crisis that we’re
trying to alleviate through inclusive democracy that will
bring us to a more truly liberatory society and concerning
the sense of urgency, do you think politically and
economically and the way globalization has taken the world
right now that there is a timeline we have and that,
if we go too much further past that, we’ll get to a point of
no return? Do you think you know this is…

Takis:
Yeah, the latest studies show, in fact, that the ecological
crisis is accelerating and scientists are surprised that we
move faster than they thought towards…

Barry:
Ecologically, but politically and economically?

Takis:
Yes, as regards the other aspects of the crisis, the
economic crisis, again, is there, in the sense of the
bipolar world I mentioned. That is, at the moment, in China
say, people work like slaves because they believe they could
all have their own car and their own villa, if not a
swimming pool and so on, but once they see in the near
future that this is impossible and, at the same time, the
gap between the privileged social groups and the rest is
growing
―as
it is at the moment―
then the present social unrest will become more and more
serious. The same thing happens also to some extent in the
developed world, that is, you have heard about the present
crisis in the USA, in terms of the credit crisis created by
mortgage lending, and the same problem has risen in
Britain as well. These are just symptoms of the fact that
this is a system which is fundamentally unstable. I do not
want to say that this system will fall by itself
because of these crises. Whatever the degree of seriousness
of these crises is at the moment, or will become in the
future, nothing will happen leading to an Inclusive
Democracy. I don’t say this. You may perfectly have
(instead) the development of an eco-fascist society, or any
kind of authoritarian society. At the moment, we are moving
towards authoritarian societies, through the war against
so-called terrorism, we are moving towards the abolition of
basic human liberties and so on. So, in effect, all this
greater authoritarianization of society simply means
that these crises, the various crises I mentioned, become
more and more serious. But, what will happen in the end will
depend, of course, on how people will react to these
developments. If they passively accept everything, as at the
moment many people seem to do, then, of course, nothing will
happen; but if they start reacting, then, you may see all
sorts of new movements, like the Inclusive Democracy
movement developing.

Barry:
I certainly hope so, and maybe Europe will be the place to
start this off because in the United States people seem to
be so engrained in their rugged individualistic,
strongly competitive mindset
that it’s hard to imagine that they can get it going from
here to there, right now, in this country. Thank you Takis
Fotopoulos for joining us on Equal Time for Freethought.

Takis:
Ok. It was a pleasure, thank you.

*This is a slightly edited (for purposes of
publication) version of the interview with subtitles
and explanatory words added, missing words replaced,
and repetitions deleted. The interview was aired on
30 December 2007 and can be heard
here.